This is a poem about the making of a poem. In January I’d signed up for the ccMixter Leap of The Heart secret mixing project before realizing that I’d be travelling in the far north of Japan. I got the secret artist sent to me while I was in a blizzard (luckily, inside a hotel which had internet in the lobby.) The following day I mixed Transcending Silence on my MacBook during a whole-day coach trip heading west. When I’d finished the remix I reflected on the entire bizarre experience and wrote a poem about it.

The music I chose is a sample by colab of Toronto simply called piano 3/4. Looped, I find it hypnotic and achingly sad yet beautiful.

meta poem

i have been to the north-eastern coast of hokkaido in winter going-with-the-floe in an ice-breaker-for-tourists and now we spend hours crossing back across the width of japan to sapporo. I spend elastic hours gazing at a pure-white landscape, the farmhouses and barns snowed in, the fir forests dabbed like plaster-of-paris scenes i’ve previously seen only on christmas cards.

and in between i am mixing on my laptop.

mixing my own previously-recorded voice reciting a poem i wrote years earlier about my father when he was still alive. blending it with some beautiful piano by dokashiteru and the slightly-raspy singing voice of hektor thillet. and i’ve never met these people but their music and my words are now embroidered into my poem, a constantly changing whitelinen landscape and my own emotions

and i am simultaneously still in that nursing hospital and inside the piano and hektor’s mouth and that minimal landscape has become a metaphor for life and death and i don’t know whether the scenery is a video-clip made for the poem or the pressure-changes in my headphones are the soundtrack for life playing out before my eyes but i am existing in all times, all places yet there is no past or future. Just here now.

This began life as pre-dated. I was having a fishing holiday at our shack on Yorke Peninsula across the Gulf from Adelaide when I was buzzed by a chopper. I found out on the TV news that night that a local boy had been taken by a shark and the helicopter contained photographers & journos looking for shots of sharks, treacherous seas and the boy’s school. I couldn’t get the idea of predators out of my head – the media even moreso than the shark.

Onlymeith has produced an ominous soundscape to underline the mercilessness of both sharks and the mass media, using Javolenus’ disquieting sub-bass, (use your best headphones!) hints of swords unsheathing and a relentless, remorseless heartbeat.

eurostar has appeared online in The Oracular Tree and in print in my first collection sparrow in an airport, New Poets Ten, Wakefield Press, 2005. It was also translated into Dutch on Amelia Walker’s blog a year ago.